> Kind of feels weird to act like people can't cook or prepare their own food from cheap ingredients, but I guess homeless people, for example, can't really.

This is a good start to understanding the correlation. Going further, poor people are often time- and energy-poor as well, whether working irregular hours or multiple jobs or simply doing themselves and their families what people with greater means might pay for. Add that being poor doesn’t afford the best kitchen conditions (space, cookware and other equipment, fuel/electricity), and working around those limitations is added drain on any available time and energy one might afford… like so many other things, it’s expensive to be poor. While it may be objectively possible to eat healthy, it’s often an unrealistic or at least demanding expectation given the circumstances.

> While it may be objectively possible to eat healthy, it’s often an unrealistic or at least demanding expectation given the circumstances.

Wow. wow. Let's recap most expensive to least: ready-made healthy > ready-made junkfood > cooking. We're talking about the poor, and we're talking about whether they prefer ready-made junkfood over cooking.

You're telling me that they're too tired and lacking of resources to cook, to eat healthy.

Now, the bar to cooking more healthy than junkfood is very low, very easy. Cooking is a very flexible activity. You can even just make sandwiches and you're beating junkfood in both cost and healthiness. That takes no energy and no resources (maybe a fridge, though one can buy ham just for the day and keep it in a cool place for a single-meal day). If they can have a stove (which can be cheap and even portable), they don't need a fridge and eggs take like 5 minutes no matter the quantity of people they have to cook for.

Like, what are you arguing?

It's expensive to be poor, but cooking is not expensive. It's the cheapest option.

I’m exhausted just … not wanting to explain what I already explained, but okay. I’m not even poor, just finally about to eat my microwave leftovers after getting settled in after almost two months on the road trying to make sure my parents are cared for. I’m not arguing anything but I’m not cooking anything either, I’m tired and that’s all I’ve got to say.

My argument is basically that ready to eat nonfood is cheaper than ready to eat food.

I mean, you can eat just apples, uncooked carrots, etc, but realistically that's not a diet.

Healthy frozen meals exist here in the UK. They're just way more expensive than the crap.

Protein is more expensive than carbs is basically the entire thing.

> I buy ready made food all of the time, I just try to go for high protein options and limit bullshit. It's a lot more expensive.

But you do it because you can afford it. People that find it expensive would first cook for their meals rather than eat junkfood for meals. Do you think they wouldn't cook because it takes time? When you're low on income, money is more valuable than time. Cooking saves money over junkfood.

> Protein is more expensive than carbs is basically the entire thing.

There's cheap sources of protein, too, like beans. Not sure how it fits with the rest of the argument though. Are you talking about people getting their protein mainly from chocolate protein bars or something like that?

I am talking exclusively about ready to eat food.

There are many reasons for a person to struggle to be able to cook.

I agree that in most cases these are solvable. Usually via money, which brings us back to... money helps.

A direct example I can give is that I have many friends who live in shared accommodation with shitty kitchens because they're shared amongst 4 people or more and inevitably someone is a cretin.

In that case invariably people end up "cooking" stuff like pizzas in order to minimize time in the shitty environment.

> A direct example I can give is that I have many friends who live in shared accommodation with shitty kitchens because they're shared amongst 4 people or more and inevitably someone is a cretin.

Ok, that makes more sense. I guess housing is so bad that not even shitty apartments that people can rent individually are available?

I'm not familiar with such arrangements, so I'm not sure how bad it can get. I guess it's an issue with the dishes, a permanently filled sink? Why not just use disposable dishes and have very few shared cookware so it's not possible to fill the space in the sink?

If home is totally useless for cooking for whatever reason, one might be able to make a kitchen portable enough to fit in a backpack by getting a single-burner portable stove. If you get a gas one, you won't depend on an electrical outlet. For cookware, a small pan and a small wooden spatula takes you far. Eggs, canned food, etc. don't need refrigeration. If one avoids using too much oil/fat, one should be able to skip needing water to wash the cookware by wiping with a paper towel. This ought to be cheap enough even for students. Park in the daily commute? There's the kitchen. Just do breakfast, and snack on e.g. carrots for other times of the day.

Who am I kidding. We're talking about people in general and not anyone in particular. That's quite awful...

I mean, this is fun problem solving, I also enjoy camping and can make healthy meals whilst I'm in the woods.

> Why not just use disposable dishes and have very few shared cookware so it's not possible to fill the space in the sink?

Your flatmates, who you can't evict, never clean up after themselves and they block the sink. The worktops are covered in dirty stuff. The oven is dirty so that you personally have to clean it each time, so in the end you give up and get takeaways.

The actual solution is to have enough capital or at least an income source in order to not have to deal with bullshit poverty world people.

> The actual solution is to have enough capital or at least an income source in order to not have to deal with bullshit poverty world people.

Ha. Being poor might not be the thing to focus on, since they're all in the same arrangement. The actual problem is that they're badly raised and don't know how to behave properly. People wouldn't have a problem with how poor they may be if they were more considerate to their flatmates.